Year: 2007

NED is getting beyond control. And is about to consume me.

Sometimes I wonder why I invented this concept at all. At other times, I feel not having invented the concept wouldn’t have changed me much – i’d’ve just called it by a different name.

Anyways, don’t be surprised if I disappear suddenly. You can assume that I’ve been taken in by NED

The Bank of Sweden Prize for economics has gone to Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin, and Roger Myerson for their work on mechanism design.

Now, do you recall the problem we faced when we wanted to buy a gift for Bunty?

235 to win from 46 overs and 8 wickets in hand as I write this. Roughly translates to around 320 in an ODI I guess, considering that two wickets are down and relaxed restriction on wides, fielding and bowling quotas. Younis Khan batting on a well made 106, along with Yousuf Youhana. Test cricket at its best.

For the sake of cricket, I hope Pakistan don’t go on to win this game. Conservatism has meant that of late, captains are hesitant to take risks, and go for sporting declarations. They usually prefer to bat the opposition out of the game before declaring, sometimes leaving themselves with too few overs to bowl the opposition out, and the team batting fourth has no incentive to score runs. Just hang in there and protect their wickets.

While that in itself can be a fascinating contest to watch, with stout defense trying to counter a strong bowling attack on a fifth day pitch, cricket would be much better off with more results. More occasions when fourth innings chases come off on the last day. More occasions where the team chasing gets bowled out. A draw is not a bad result, but sometimes the way it is arrived at is. More aggression from the captains would mean lesser, and when they do happen, better draws.

From this point of view, it is important that South Africa don’t lose this game. If they do, Graeme Smith will get unfairly accused for “throwing it all away” and the rare aggression that he has displayed will disappear from cricket altogether. The fear of losing has meant test cricket has already become much more conservative than it was a decade or two ago. It is important that the aggression is restored.

That said, Smith’s performance hasn’t been flawless. For example, he should have promoted de Viliers or Boucher when he got out, and gone for some quick runs, rather than getting Prince to waste a few balls before getting out. It was clear at the outset that he would declare at Kallis’s century. His aim should’ve been to maximzie the runs at the other end while Kallis made his ton.

Anyways, we are all set to have a fascinating afternoon of cricket on. I sincerely hope that after lunch, Pakistan go for the target and end up losing by a small margin. That, I think, would be the best result from the point of view of test cricket in general. Meanwhile, Baada predicts that Inzy will score less than 6 in his last innings, and thus will miss out on breaking Miandad’s record.

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading several articles about the GDP growth rate and inflation and balancing the two by means of monetary policy and all that.

Now, aren’t GDP growth rate and inflation extremely highly inter-related? Unless the country has a massive trade imbalance?

Let us take the simplistic case of no foreign trade. Now, the GDP is the total value of goods and services produced in the country. So GDP growth rate is the growth in this total value of goods and services. Now, how does growth in GDP happen? One of 2 things must happen – more goods and services must be produced and sold, or the existing goods and services will become more expensive – in other words, prices go up – in other words inflation happens.

What about the other case, where production goes up? Let us assume that there’s no change to inventory, so what is produced gets consumed. Is it possible for consumption to go up without a corresponding increase in price? Shouldn’t the price change at least in lag? Doesn’t that contribute to inflation? And if suddenly more things are being purchased, doesn’t that mean money supply has gone up? Which implies inflation?

Now, bring back foreign trade and let’s assume the country is an exporter. Then, yeah, one could make more money by increasing prices abroad for all products, and thus improve the GDP growth without affecting domestic inflation. BUT, if there is free flow of capital, there are likely to be inflows, which will put upward pressure on the currency (which will put downward pressure on growth) and consequently on interest rates which will normalize and so on…

Tell me if i’ve got something wrong here… ??

Check out this article he has written, trying to recommend who would be the better guy to partner Steven Gerrard in the center of English midfield. To briefly describe his analysis,

1. you develop a framework
2. assign weights to each component (here 1/5 for each)
3. do some qualitative analysis and then arbitrarily assign scores to both guys on each component
4. aggregate across components
5. then forget the wonderful framework and the score and use some “human factors” and stuff to come to the obvious decision

An extremely popular method. A method so commonly used by consultants (and they get paid millions for it). And the consultants would’ve been trained well to use such methods in B-schools – they would’ve used it for numerous course projects and assignments, and rewarded for it.

I’m writing this from my nokia 6670 mobile phone. In a volvo bus on way

Just saw “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly” for the third time this afternoon, on Sony Pic. What a movie. Whatta movie.

There are two things that make a movie (or a book or a play for that matter) great. First is the story. Second, and more important, is the way the story is sold. If you take the say 10 greatest movies of all time, you’ll notice that most of them have a rather simple and straightforward storyline. What differentiates them is the way the story is told!

As an aside, Sony Pix rocks. About one ad break every half hour, and one ad every break. However, as Kodhi just remarked, the good times may not last if the channel gets too popular. Let’s keep fingers crossed.??

OK this post is coming up a full four days too late, but it doesn’t matter. Extreme NED at work which has spilled over to personal life, and a few lazy days have contributed to the delay.

Anyways, the last day of the four day weekend last weekend (i took monday off) was spent going to madras for the IIT Madras open quiz. For a bit of a background, the first edition of this was held a month before I graduated from IITM, and I was one of the quizmasters, along with Bofi, A Mani and Shamanth. There were two major factors that led to the formation of this quiz. Firstly, IITM didn’t host an open quiz, and hence the amazing potential for setting questions that existed in this vast campus used to be spent exclusively to set college quizzes. And more importantly, Shamanth and I had never hosted a major quiz during our IITM career, and this was a good opportunity to make amends.

At some vague quiz somewhere you might encounter the question “what is common to Hindu barbers and the Bangalore-Madras Shatabdi?”. The answer is that both don’t work on Tuesdays. Taking the Lalbagh instead meant that we could wake up an hour late, but more importantly, gave us a whole hour less to have lunch (lalbagh leaves at 0630 and reaches at 1200, while the Shatabdi leaves at 0600 and reaches at 1100). There was also the small matter of buying breakfast, as the Lalbagh A/C didn’t have the free food as against the Shatabdi where stewards kept serving your every half hour.

And what the hell happened to Rail Neer? That brand of bottled water that had been launched with so much fanfare by Lalu? It was nowhere to be seen either on the platform or in the train. There was a host of arbit “brands” – blue, swan, torrent, etc. all with a small label of “bottled specially for IRCTC”. Not enough. Give me Rail Neer.

Madras is in the process of constructing a metro. Flying train it is called locally. Part of it is operational and mostly empty, leading to extremely low frequency of operation. There is a special station for this in front of Central called “Park Town”, which looks shady enough to promote several “unholy” activities. Anyways we took the flying train from here to Mylapore (referred to in railway lingo as Tirumailai – holy peacock as

?explained – this was going to become significant later on) after which I took an auto to Adyar to meet kodhi and

and

?and baada for lunch.

?and we are like this wonly (who, incidentally, accused madras quizzers for mugging too much. Remember the incident on the train to Landmark? I immediately pointed that out and they said that it was nothing compared to the amount madras quizzers mug) went for lunch somewhere nearby in Mylapore itself.

Three years away and I seem to have forgotten madras. I had to go to Odyssey and i told the auto guy ‘adyar depot’ mistakenly thinknig the bus stand in front of Odyssey is Adyar depot. Think that’s adyar terminus. And I thankfully quickly realized my mistake when teh guy turned onto LB road from top of the adyar signal flyover. It was an extra five minute walk. There wasn’t much time for lunch and I had to settle for a dosa and an uthappam. Auto from there to SAC at IITM, and I tried to be too cute to direct the guy on the short cut to SAC through the lib (i’d never used it in my IITM days) and we promptly got lost. Reached 15 minutes after scheduled start time, and the quiz was about to begin.

SAC was full. The only times I’d seen it fuller was for inauguration and convocation. Not a seat was empty. And the only place available seemed to be the galleries. Special quota for old quizmasters, i shouted to Pota, one of the quizmasters for the day. We were asked to settle down on the floor right up front. Perfect, I thought, as I kicked off my floaters and settled down.

It is a matter of great pride to see that something you started has grown. And grown the IITM Open Quiz has, in the last five years. In the first year, we didn’t have much time and just settled for a convenient Sunday. The next year onwards, though, the organizers had “captured” the October 2nd national holiday slot. And it had evidently worked. The Hindu reported that over 1300 people took this year’s quiz. More than double the 600 that attended when we did it.

It is not uncommon in quizzing that you mention some good funda to someone during casual conversation and then it gets asked in a quiz. There was a question in the prelims about Parvati turning into a peahen and doing penance and some place named after that. None of us had ever heard of this legend. And that’s when Udupendra’s translation of holy peacock came into good use. This was evidently an aeroplane paandi question (there were two more in the prelims).

Apart from the odd bits of aeroplane paandi, the prelims was by and large good. We qualified fairly comfortably, while there were a few upsets, with quite a few usual suspects missing out. The finals were long and largely excellent, easily the best finals I’ve sat through for almost a year. Most of the things were workoutable, there weren’t too many questions on vague domains, and no team was running away with it. The only blot was the points system for the long visual connect, where the team answering first could win upto four times the number of points awarded for a normal question. This would prove to be decisive in the end, when QED, the first to crack the LVC, edged us by 1 point for second spot.

An LVC is a strong concept I agree. Special rounds deserve more points I agree, just for that audience value if not anything else. However, awarding up to four times the normal points for a single question is a little too much I guess, and places undue importance on the special round, especially when the rest of the quiz has been lowscoring.

The quiz was followed by what is the now usual IIMB meetup. Baada had to run to catch a train but the rest of us were there. And just enough transportation (one car and bike for 7 of us) to move us. But Madras has a severe dearth of eat out places. It being the evening of a national holiday doesn’t help. Most places are bursting at the seams, and there is a long waiting time. We finally settled down for a half hour wait at Cream Center where we had chaat for starters and Mexican for the main course. And extremely strnog ice cream soda for dessert.

An excellent end to a strong long weekend. I remained on a high till the following afternoon. And then I went to work.

PS: Having unusual team names can sometimes be counter-productive. Of late we have been calling ourselves NED (short for No Enthu Da). On the morning of IITM Open, I wanted to change the team name to Technoplast, following a Business Standard headline that Technoplast had taken over NED Energy, but then got shouted down.

Yesterday, JK asks me “so is NED happening for the Bangalore Landmark?” . I didn’t know what to say!??

Next time i get a marketing call from a female representing some bank, I want to just ask “so what’s your rate?”.

on a related note, can anyone tell me how to register myself on the do not call registry? and does it help?

Update

I sent an sms saying “START DND” to 121 (i’m on airtel) and got a reply saying that my number will be in the registry in 45 days. thanks all for the help. ??